Seven cascading problems. One question nobody had asked.
A $3–5M software business had grown almost by accident inside a 60-year consultancy and was straining under its own weight. The problem wasn’t the code. It was a decision no one had made.
15+
Diagnostic interviews
5 → 1
Competing visions → one owner
8–10 → 2
Products in focus
Software crept into the business almost by accident — point solutions and calculators built to support consulting engagements, then two flagship products that grew into genuine SaaS offerings with customers across three continents. On paper, $3–5M a year in licence fees and consulting pull-through looked like traction. Underneath, the organisation was straining.
- Industry
- Engineering consulting, oil & gas
- Revenue
- ~$100M · software $3–5M
- Age
- 60 years, privately owned
- Products
- 8–10, with a team sized for 2
“Digital doesn’t work. Is it a talent problem or a process problem?”
“Neither. The company had never decided whether it was building a software business — so any leader could veto, and none could greenlight.”
Everyone was working hard. Nothing felt like it was working. Tech leads were coding, reviewing, deploying and mentoring simultaneously. Product owners doubled as salespeople and client-success managers. Division leaders ran one-person go-to-market operations. Leadership’s shorthand for all of it was blunt: “digital doesn’t work.”
- Fifteen-plus semi-structured interviews — executives, division leaders, product owners, tech leads, developers, QA, design — scored against a six-dimension SaaS maturity model calibrated for a consultancy attempting a software transition.
- Every dimension landed between 1.0 and 2.0 on five — “ad hoc” to “emerging.” But the lowest scores weren’t in engineering. They were above the code: strategic alignment and customer success, both at the floor.
- Five leaders held five different visions — platform consolidation, consulting enhancement, a $10–20M growth business. None were wrong. None had ever been forced to converge.
- One designer had redesigned the same feature three times, because leaders who missed the meetings vetoed already-completed work.
The deliverable wasn’t a report. It was a diagnosis paired with a sequenced plan across six phases, built on one principle: each phase frees the capacity the next one needs. Phase 0 was the lever — the decision itself.
- 01
Phase 0: make the decision
Appoint one accountable owner of the software business. Stand up a two-tier technical leadership structure — an internal Head of Engineering for execution, paired with a fractional CTO for direction. Create a formal incubator to hold the 6–8 non-core products so the two flagships get the team’s full attention.
- 02
Phases 1–2: free the capacity
DevOps automation and product analytics — sequenced to when the team would actually have bandwidth to sustain them.
- 03
Phases 3–5: build the discipline
A buy-vs-build framework, pricing discipline, and a real software P&L — each timed to the capacity the earlier phases released.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountability | Anyone can veto, no one can greenlight | One accountable owner | |
| Technical leadership | Tech leads wearing four hats | Head of Engineering + fractional CTO | |
| Hiring | Stalled | Phase 0 DevOps and CTO searches launched | |
| Product focus | 8–10 products, 2-product team | Cost-neutral plan rationalising to 2 flagships | |
| Strategy | 5 competing visions | 1 documented decision + sequenced roadmap |
The engagement replaced five competing visions with one documented decision and a roadmap the executive team could hold each other accountable to.
“An organisation that had relitigated the same decisions for years now has one answer, one owner, and one sequence to follow.”
The metrics are deliberately absent — for now. This was a structural reset, not a quarter-over-quarter story. Test coverage, deployment frequency and renewal rate are worth revisiting once Phases 1–2 have run. Anonymised at the client’s request; a version with post-implementation numbers can follow when the results are in. I’d rather show you nothing than show you numbers that aren’t real yet.
Seven operational failures, fifteen interviews, a six-dimension maturity model — and the whole thing resolved to one question asked at the level of authority that could answer it. That’s the pattern under most stalled businesses: the expensive problem isn’t a lack of effort or talent. It’s a decision that’s been quietly deferred, hiding behind everything downstream of it.
What decision is your business quietly working around?
A Two-Day Teardown finds where the money is actually stuck — starting with whether your numbers are even real — and names the one to three moves that unstick it. You keep the map either way.